By Marjorie A. Gordon-DeLee, MA December 1, 2018 An individual hired (who then becomes a state agency employee) by the State of South Carolina must always remember that they have been hired to represent the state agency in which hired them in providing quality service to the citizens of the State of South Carolina or any other person living outside of the State of South Carolina in a professional manner using business etiquette at all times.
Upon being hired, the state agency employee must learn all of the state laws that apply in assisting the citizens in the state and customers outside of the State of South Carolina and become knowledgeable in the services provided by that particular state agency and the information that should or should not be disclosed to the public according to the laws of the State of South Carolina. One of the many laws to learn as a state employee for the State of South Carolina upon hire pertains to Title 30 – Public Records, Chapter 4, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). See below.
South Carolina Code of Laws Unannotated
Title 30 - Public Records
CHAPTER 4
Freedom of Information Act
SECTION 30-4-10. Short title.
This chapter shall be known and cited as the "Freedom of Information Act".
HISTORY: 1978 Act No. 593, Section 1.
SECTION 30-4-15. Findings and purpose.
The General Assembly finds that it is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner so that citizens shall be advised of the performance of public officials and of the decisions that are reached in public activity and in the formulation of public policy. Toward this end, provisions of this chapter must be construed so as to make it possible for citizens, or their representatives, to learn and report fully the activities of their public officials at a minimum cost or delay to the persons seeking access to public documents or meetings.
HISTORY: 1987 Act No. 118, Section 1.
SECTION 30-4-20. Definitions.
(a) "Public body" means any department of the State, a majority of directors or their representatives of departments within the executive branch of state government as outlined in Section 1-30-10, any state board, commission, agency, and authority, any public or governmental body or political subdivision of the State, including counties, municipalities, townships, school districts, and special purpose districts, or any organization, corporation, or agency supported in whole or in part by public funds or expending public funds, including committees, subcommittees, advisory committees, and the like of any such body by whatever name known, and includes any quasi-governmental body of the State and its political subdivisions, including, without limitation, bodies such as the South Carolina Public Service Authority and the South Carolina State Ports Authority. Committees of health care facilities, which are subject to this chapter, for medical staff disciplinary proceedings, quality assurance, peer review, including the medical staff credentialing process, specific medical case review, and self-evaluation, are not public bodies for the purpose of this chapter.
(b) "Person" includes any individual, corporation, partnership, firm, organization or association.
(c) "Public record" includes all books, papers, maps, photographs, cards, tapes, recordings, or other documentary materials regardless of physical form or characteristics prepared, owned, used, in the possession of, or retained by a public body. Records such as income tax returns, medical records, hospital medical staff reports, scholastic records, adoption records, records related to registration, and circulation of library materials which contain names or other personally identifying details regarding the users of public, private, school, college, technical college, university, and state institutional libraries and library systems, supported in whole or in part by public funds or expending public funds, or records which reveal the identity of the library patron checking out or requesting an item from the library or using other library services, except nonidentifying administrative and statistical reports of registration and circulation, and other records which by law are required to be closed to the public are not considered to be made open to the public under the provisions of this act; nothing herein authorizes or requires the disclosure of those records where the public body, prior to January 20, 1987, by a favorable vote of three-fourths of the membership, taken after receipt of a written request, concluded that the public interest was best served by not disclosing them. Nothing herein authorizes or requires the disclosure of records of the Board of Financial Institutions pertaining to applications and surveys for charters and branches of banks and savings and loan associations or surveys and examinations of the institutions required to be made by law. Information relating to security plans and devices proposed, adopted, installed, or utilized by a public body, other than amounts expended for adoption, implementation, or installation of these plans and devices, is required to be closed to the public and is not considered to be made open to the public under the provisions of this act (https://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t30c004.php)
The entire Chapter 30 was not provided, but can be retrieved from this link at https://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t30c004.php. Moreover, in Section 30-4-20. Definitions. (c) which pertains to “Public Record”, the state agency employee needs to become familiar with this law as soon as possible as they proceed to perform services to the public. Not all information within a state agency is to be disclosed to the public, therefore, it is important that as an employee, one must know what is and what is not to be disclosed publicly.
Maintaining confidentiality means everything when working in any business entity.
The word “confidentiality” has both casual and legal meanings in the workplace and will have different meanings throughout your professional career. In some instances, confidentiality refers to not discussing internal goings-on with co-workers. In other instances, it refers to not sharing trade secrets and other company information with competitors, the press or anyone outside of your company.
Legal Definition
During your time in the workforce, you’ll have access to information your employer doesn’t want made public or revealed inside the company. This can include salaries, employee perks, client lists, trade secrets, sales numbers, customer information, news about pending terminations, reasons for a firing, phone codes or computer passwords. You may not divulge this information while you are working for an employer or after you leave. In some instances, you will be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement requiring you to keep company secrets after you leave an employer. Some companies might offer to hire you specifically because they want you to bring inside information about your former employer they can use. Even if you don’t sign a confidentiality agreement, sensitive information you have might be protected under state or federal laws (Ashe-Edmunds, 2018)
It is vitally important that all state agency employees understand that confidentiality is of the utmost importance in your positions as a public employee with the State of South Carolina as well as in any other established business.
A public employee’s main purpose for working in this agency, first and foremost, is to provide quality service to their customers. To ensure that whoever comes to that organization is well served to the best of that employees’ ability. If an employee is unable to resolve a problem that the customer is experiencing, it is the duty of that employee to locate another employee who is more knowledgeable and might be able to provide satisfaction in resolving the customer’s problem. We must always go that extra mile for the customer that we are serving because that is the purpose of the government state agency. Our citizens look to us for answers in solving their problems.
If one’s direct responsibilities are not with serving the general public; then it might possibly be with assisting management in some other capacity. With that said, as an employee of that state agency, service to another employee is still being performed to carry out the mission of that particular state agency.
These agencies do not belong to us, we do not own them, we are employees who were hired to perform a duty, as a representative of that agency. However, many employees become complacent once they have been hired, have their foot in the door so to speak, and forget that they are there to fulfill a service to the citizens of the State of South Carolina as a public employee. Over the years, this type of unethical behavior has reverberated all throughout many of the state agencies in the State of South Carolina which were apparent from the many complaints filed with the S. C. State Ethics Commission during my tenure. I am a witness of such complaint filings of unpracticed integrity, dishonesty, and corruptness that were investigated by the State Ethics Commission. Many public employees were not abiding by the S. C. Code of Laws in administering their duties at their place of employment. Remember, the S. C. Code of Ethics Laws can be found at https://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t08c013.php to refer to when in doubt of what the right decision must be in fulfilling a responsibility as a South Carolina State agency employee.
When people come to an establishment to have a service fulfilled or an issue resolved, it is not because they woke up that morning and decided to get dress and drive to this entity just because, as if they had nothing else better to do. They need help. Therefore, as a representative of the state, employees in which you are employed, you are not to wait for the customer to be greeted upon entering the office, but it is the duty of the first employee that the customer comes in contact with to make the visit more inviting and welcoming by greeting them with a smile upon their entrance. Let the customer know that they are welcome in at this state agency so that they can be relaxed and be able to better articulate why they are there seeking assistance.
Yes, some customers enter an agency with an irate attitude, but it is the duty of the representative of the business to have the emotional stability to remain calm and listen to the customer. Speaking with the customer in a calm voice and allowing the customer to relay the message to you will many times soften and lower the voice of the irate person. If the customer persists in their angry demeanor, in a soft tone, simply inform the customer that they need to calm down if they desire to be helped.
As employees of the organization, you are not there in these positions to ruin the reputation of that organization. A bad or negative interaction by the customers is spread within the community, thereby leaving other people who might need assistance with a not so savory impression of the organization and its willingness to help the people of that community.
A smile can go a long way to resolve a tense situation. We need more smiles in our public institutions that serve the needs of the people and less frowning and attitudes. We need more people with a sense of compassion for the person that they are assisting. Always refer back to the mission of the state agency or organization in which you are employed to keep your focus in the right direction.
Below are 16 Customer Service Skills that Every Employee Needs which was created by Gregory Ciotti (2018), HelpScout.
1. Patience
If you don’t see this near the top of a customer service skills list, you should stop reading.
Not only is patience important to customers, who often reach out to support when they are confused and frustrated, but it’s also important to the business at large: we’ve shown you before that great service beats fast service every single time.
Yet patience shouldn’t be used as an excuse for slothful service either!
Derek Sivers explained his view on “slower” service as being an interaction where the time spent with the customer was used to better understand their problems and needs from the company.
If you deal with customers on a daily basis, be sure to stay patient when they come to you stumped and frustrated, but also be sure to take the time to truly figure out what they want — they’d rather get competent service than be rushed out the door!
2. Attentiveness
The ability to really listen to customers is so crucial for providing great service for a number of reasons.
Earlier I went over a few customer feedback systems, and before that I showed you the data on why listening to customer feedback is a must for many businesses who are looking to innovate.
Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer interactions (watching the language/terms that they use to describe their problems), but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.
For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that your software’s dashboard isn’t laid out correctly. Customers aren’t likely to say, “Please improve your UX!,” but they may say things like, “I can never find the search feature,” or, “Where is the _____ function at again?”
What are your customers telling you without saying it?
3. Clear communication skills
Make sure you’re getting to the problem at hand quickly;
customers don’t need your life story or to hear about how your day is going.
More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it’s best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.
An example: The last time I went to get work done on my car, I was told by an employee that if I wanted to get an oil change, it would be “included” in my final bill.
I thought that meant I’d be getting it for free, yet as it turns out, that wasn’t the case. The employee apologized and I truly believe it was an accident (they just worked there), but I haven’t been back to that shop since because of the miscommunication.
When it comes to important points that you need to relay clearly to customers, keep it simple and leave nothing to doubt.
4. Knowledge of the Product
The best forward-facing employees in your company will work on having a deep knowledge of how your product works. Without knowing your product from front to back, you won’t know how to help customers when they run into problems.
It’s not that every single team member should be able to build your product from scratch, but rather they should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it every day would. Every new Help Scout employee, for example, is trained on customer support during their first or second week on the job — it’s a critical component of our employee onboarding process.
Knowing the product that you support inside and out is mission critical for anyone in support,” says Help Scout support team member Elyse Roach. “Having that solid product foundation not only ensures you’ve got the best tricks up your sleeve to help customers navigate even the most complex situations, it also helps you build understanding about their experience so that you can become their strongest advocate.”
Without knowing your product from front-to-back, you won't know how to help customers when they run into problems.
5. Ability to use positive language
Sounds like fluffy nonsense, but your ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns can truly go a long way in creating happy customers.
Language is a very important part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use.
An example: Let’s say a customer contacts you with an interest in a particular product, but that product happens to be backordered until next month.
Small changes that employ “positive language” can greatly affect how the customer hears your response...
Without positive language: “I can’t get you that product until next month; it is back-ordered and unavailable at this time.”
With positive language: “That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse.”
The first example isn’t negative per se, but the tone it conveys feels abrupt and impersonal, and can be taken the wrong way by customers, especially in email support when the perception of written language can skew negative.
Conversely, the second example is stating the same thing (the item is unavailable), but instead focuses on when/how the customer will get to their resolution rather than focusing on the negative.
6. Acting skills
Sometimes you’re going to come across people that you’ll never be able to make happy.
Situations outside of your control (they had a terrible day, or they are just a natural-born complainer) will sometimes creep into your usual support routine, and you’ll be greeted with those “barnacle” customers that seem to want nothing else but to pull you down.
Every great customer service rep will have those basic acting skills necessary to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who may be just plain grumpy.
7. Time management skills
Hey, despite my many research-backed rants on why you should spend more time with customers, the bottom line is that there is a limit, and you need to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner.
The trick here is that this should also be applied when realizing when you simply cannot help a customer. If you don’t know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support professional will get a customer over to someone who does.
Don’t waste time trying to go above and beyond for a customer in an area where you will just end up wasting both of your time!
8. Ability to ‘read’ customers
You won’t always be able to see customers face-to-face, and in many instances (nowadays) you won’t even hear a customer’s voice!
That doesn’t exempt you from understanding some basic principles of behavioral psychology and being able to “read” the customer’s current emotional state.
This is an important part of the personalization process as well, because it takes knowing your customers to create a personal experience for them.
More importantly though, this skill is essential because you don’t want to mis-read a customer and end up losing them due to confusion and miscommunication. As Emily Triplett Lentz wrote in Boost Customer Happiness with Exclamations and Emoticons:
“I rarely use a smiley face in a support email when the customer’s signature includes “PhD,” for example — not that academics are humorless, just that “:)” isn’t likely to get you taken seriously by someone who spent five years deconstructing utopian undertones in nineteenth-century fictional autobiography.”
Look and listen for subtle clues about their current mood, patience level, personality, etc., and you’ll go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.
9. A calming presence
There are a lot of metaphors for this type of personality: “keeps their cool,” “staying cool under pressure,” and so on, but it all represents the same thing: the ability some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic.
I’ve had my fair share of hairy hosting situations, and I can tell you in all honesty that the #1 reason I stick with certain hosting companies is due to the ability of their customer support team to keep me from pulling my hair out.
The best customer service reps know that they can’t let a heated customer force them to lose their cool
; in fact, it is their job to try to be the “rock” for a customer who thinks the world is falling down due to their current problem.
10. Goal-oriented focus
This may seem like a strange thing to list as a customer service skill, but I assure you it’s vitally important.
In my article on empowering employees, I noted that many customer service experts have shown how giving employees unfettered power to “WOW” customers doesn’t always generate the returns many businesses expect to see.
That’s because it leaves employees without goals, and business goals + customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service.
Relying on frameworks like the Net Promoter Score can help businesses come up with guidelines for their employees that allow plenty of freedom to handle customers on a case-to-case basis, but also leave them priority solutions and “go-to” fixes for common problems.
11. Ability to handle surprises
Sometimes the customer support world is going to throw you a curveball.
Maybe the problem you encounter isn’t specifically covered in the company’s guidelines, or maybe the customer isn’t reacting how you thought they would.
Whatever the case, it’s best to be able to think on your feet ... but it’s even better to create guidelines for yourself in these sorts of situations.
Let’s say, for instance, you want to come up with a quick system for when you come across a customer who has a product problem you’ve never seen before ...
Who? One thing you can decide right off the bat is who you should consider your “go-to” person when you don’t know what to do. The CEO might be able to help you, but you can’t go to them with every single question! Define a logical chain for yourself to use, then you won’t be left wondering who you should forward the problem to.
What? When the problem is noticeably out of your league, what are you going to send to the people above? The full conversation, just the important parts, or maybe some highlights and an example of a similar ticket?
How? When it comes time to get someone else involved, how are you going to contact them? For instance, at Help Scout we use our own product to assign conversations to another team member, or @mention the person from whom we need help in a note within the conversation.
12. Persuasion skills
This is one a lot of people didn’t see coming!
Experienced customer support personnel know that oftentimes, you will get messages in your inbox that are more about the curiosity of your company’s product, rather than having problems with it.
(Especially true if your email is available on-site, like ours).
To truly take your customer service skills to the next level, you need to have some mastery of persuasion so you can convince interested customers that your product is right for them (if it truly is).
It’s not about making a sales pitch in each email, but it is about not letting potential customers slip away because you couldn’t create a compelling message that your company’s product is worth purchasing!
13. Tenacity
Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done (and not take shortcuts) is a key skill when providing the kind of service that people talk about.
The memorable customer service stories out there (many of which had a huge impact on the business) were created by a single employee who refused to just do the “status quo” when it came to helping someone out.
Remembering that your customers are people too, and knowing that putting in the extra effort will come back to you ten-fold should be your driving motivation to never “cheat” your customers with lazy service.
14. Closing ability
To be clear, this has nothing to do with “closing sales” or other related terms.
Being able to close with a customer means being able to end the conversation with confirmed satisfaction (or as close to it as you can achieve) and with the customer feeling that everything has been taken care of (or will be).
Getting booted after a customer service call or before all of their problems have been addressed is the last thing that customers want, so be sure to take the time to confirm with customers that each and every issue they had on deck has been entirely resolved.
Your willingness to do this shows the customer three very important things:
That you care about getting it right
That you're willing to keep going until you get it right
That the customer is the one who determines what “right” is.
When you get a customer to, “Yes, I’m all set!” is when you know the conversation is over.
15. Empathy
Perhaps empathy — the ability to understand and share the feelings of another — is more of a character trait than a skill. But since empathy can be learned and improved upon, we’d be remiss not to include it here. In fact, if your organization tests job applicants for customer service aptitude, you’d be hard pressed to look for a more critical skill than empathy.
That’s because even when you can’t tell the customer exactly what they want to hear, a dose of care, concern and understanding will go a long way. A support rep’s ability to empathize with a customer and craft a message that steers things toward a better outcome can often make all the difference.
16. Willingness to learn
If you came across this article and read all the way to the bottom, you likely already have this skill (nice job!).
This is probably the most general skill on the list, but it’s still necessary.
Those who don’t seek to improve what they do, whether it’s building products, marketing businesses, or helping customers, will get left behind by the people willing to invest in their skills.
That’s a big part of why happiness ratings are built into our help desk product, and team members can access and learn from reports detailing their customers’ happiness over time.
We also love how the Buffer team approaches this skill with their wonderful customer happiness updates.
The updates are public, detailed, and go through how the support team (and the company at large) handled incoming emails for the month.
What better way can a startup’s support team learn as it goes then breaking down their own customer happiness metrics each and every month, for the public to see?
Your turn!
Reference
Ashe-Edmunds, S. (2018). What Is the Meaning of Confidentiality in the Workplace? Retrieved December 1, 2018 from https://work.chron.com/meaning-confidentiality-workplace-21886.html
Ciotti, G. (2018). 16 Customer Service Skills that Every Employee Needs. Retrieved on December 1, 2018 from https://www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-service-skills/
S. C. State Legislature. Retrieved December 1, 2018 from https://www.scstatehouse.gov/code/t30c004.php
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